


Left to Carry Dust

by glittercantbestopped



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Episode: s01e03 Dead in the Water, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:53:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1810933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittercantbestopped/pseuds/glittercantbestopped
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucas is ten when he learns that the world is not a friendly place.<br/>He is nineteen when he accepts it.</p><p>Brief glimpses of Lucas' life, after "Dead in the Water".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Left to Carry Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Lucas's age roughly matches up with the seasons (10/11= season1, 19= season 9) but there is some minor overlap. I've placed his birthday in early april wich is toward the end of most seasons, although the last few are a bit more ambiguous with their dates.  
> Special thanks to [purpletoungeddragon](http://purpletoungeddragon.tumblr.com/) for editing and to [irishdancr24](http://irishdancr24.tumblr.com//) for editing and the idea. This whole thing is sort of over a year late, sorry!

        Lucas is ten when he learns that the world is not a friendly place.

        At ten he meets two men with hard eyes and calluses deeper than their skin. They save him, save his mother, then leave in a car that fades into the night and down a long stretch of road. They dissipate like ghosts, rolling out of town as gracelessly and quickly as they had rolled in, leaving nothing behind but a mourning mother and a boy who knows what's hiding in the dark. In the years following, he sometimes thinks he knows more than even those Winchester brothers do. 

       The visions don’t leave him, though they become little more than hazy flashes of moments. Sometimes he sees the brothers, fighting all the monsters that lurk in lakes and shadows. He sees them roam across America in their ghost car with beings of light and void. 

       His visions are rare, for now, restricted only to his little town and the Winchester boys.

 

\---

 

       He is eleven, and he still does't say much. Lucas sees a man with yellow eyes in his sleep but the man cannot see him back. Lucas wishes that the Winchesters would come back, and make the dreams stop.

 

\---

 

       When he’s twelve, his mother’s hands stop shaking. She still hates water. She keeps her distance from anything with a drain pipe and washes dishes in buckets and cleans herself with sponges. But her hands are steady and on his birthday she takes him out into the empty fields with grandfather’s old shotgun and she teaches him how to shoot. She doesn’t really know what else to teach him to keep him safe any more.

Lucas' hands only shake when visions assault him so he learns to aim and shoot out in short muddy grass with his mother's solid hand on his shoulder. They don't talk about his grandfather or lakes or why they are out in a wet field shooting at bottles they don't fear. The sun reflects off of his mother's jewelry when he aims and she gives him soft instructions. She smiles though, when the bottles fly off the fence. 

        After, when they are home and Lucas’ arm is sore, she locks the gun up in the safe, and hides the bullets away in the locked drawer of her jewelry box that he wasn’t supposed to know about.

      He sees Sam Winchester die. He sees Sam Winchester live. He locks himself in his room and tries to understand what that means.

 

\---

 

       When Lucas is thirteen, Dean Winchester dies as well. Lucas doesn’t question what that means. He’s beginning to see a pattern.

 

\---

 

       He’s fourteen when a friend of a friend gets ahold of some beer and they all gather around out in the woods a mile away from where the lake had been, far enough away that Lucas will sleep easy. They drink because there’s nothing else to do. Lucas thinks its too sour to be enjoyable but Ricky gives him easy smiles and Jack is telling bad jokes so Lucas keeps drinking. An hour passes and he laughs louder than he has in years. Two hours pass and he blacks out. The next day, Jack doesn’t talk to him and Ricky, a little skittish, says Lucas is a scary drunk. He doesn’t remember what happened but he does remember the fire, the blood, the screaming, and the calm of the after before the bright and terrible ending. He always remembers his visions.

       The day after, there are new sheets of paper in a locked box beneath his bed of a winged man with eyes like God and mercy. Mercy, in the end, was cruel and God wasn’t there. He doesn’t understand yet that the future waits to find him when he least wants it.

      Jack never speaks with him again and Ricky isn’t the same. Lucas isn't surprised. Friends are hard to come by for a boy who keeps a stack of scribbled prophesy beneath his bed and rubs salt on his hands. He learns to try to not care.

      He doesn’t think the world is going to end, even if the Winchesters do. Even if he should.

 

\---

 

       At fifteen, during a hot summer night, he sees. It isn’t the Winchesters or the occasional glimpse of his town that flashes in his mind like blobs of ink. Its like Peter again. There once was an old man in an old house, his visions show him, who lived on his own and died on his own, waiting for his children to come home. He is waiting still.

      He fills a duffle bag with salt and his grandfather’s shotgun, bullets rattling in his palm when he lifts them out from amongst his mother’s earrings. He doesn’t use them, which is good. He hadn’t known that they wouldn’t have helped. He arms himself with his grandmother’s old iron ring and a map. He parks an hour outside of town in the middle of the night, at a house with rotten wood. He’s shaking. He slips out of his car and creeps slowly toward the house with salt in one hand and a lighter in his pocket. The gun is slung across his back and it hits his shoulder blades with each step like a slow drum beat.

      The door to the house slams open and a woman falls out in a twirl of blonde hair. Her gun is in her hand and the bullet hits the ghost as it tries to follow her through the door, flickering violently out of sight like a glitch. The woman is swearing and scrambling back to her feet without letting go of her shotgun. Lucas freezes for an instant then darts for her, because he knows, he knows, that she only has three seconds to regain her footing and she will take five. The ghost screams when Lucas flings salt at it as it reappears then disperses violently. The woman doesn’t hesitate and grabs his shoulder to prop herself up, takes a handful of salt from him, and runs into the house. He follows, gun bouncing across his back. She looks over her shoulder at him and growls in frustration.

      “Get the hell out of here.” She shouts, rounding a corner into the kitchen, her hair spinning around her. Lucas keeps running after her, into the kitchen. In the center of the kitchen table is an old worn photograph, the silver frame gleaming in the moonlight that breaks through the cracked windows. Lucas could see, See, the trailing shadows that twisted themselves into space to tether the ghost to the picture. It was an anchor in a sea of restless time and decay. He snatches it, dropping the salt, as the ghost reappears and reaches for the woman, who turns violently and holds her gun steady. She throws the salt clutched in her hand as Lucas flicks on his lighter and holds it to the silver. The ghost screams and lunges for Lucas but the woman, and her bullet, is faster. The ghost’s image falls like dust. The woman lowers her gun slowly and stares at him. They are both breathing heavy and white knuckled grips on their weapons. She sets her gun down, slowly, reluctantly, and takes the candle stick from him. She puts it in the old fireplace and sets it all aflame.      

       He’s fifteen and Kat who has bright blond hair, whose story starts with Winchester and ends with ghosts in locked rooms, teaches him what she knows. The Winchester’s are oddly silent.

 

\---

 

       By sixteen he has a shotgun under his bed that his mother doesn’t know about. He shoots rock salt instead of bullets, has stick and poke symbols across his chest in dull black ink, and lies to his mother when she asks where’s he’s been. She thinks he has more than one friend at school, that he goes to parties on Friday nights, and that his volunteer sheets aren't signed by Kat as they sit in her old abused car as they watch houses and sort bullets. It was almost easy.

      As far as his mother knows, he likes to camp in the woods with friends every few week ends. She smiles when he tells her, and reminds him to not have too much fun. He wonders what she’d say if she knew his best friend was a woman seven years older than him who has a carved out back seat filled with ammunition and holy water. All the contacts in his phone are other hunters and Ricky, who doesn’t send him texts anymore.

      Lucas’ visions become stronger, reach farther. They become distinct, playing whole days in a flash. They no longer just show him the past and the now, but they reach out by a day, two days, enough time for he and Kat to try to prevent them. They do, for the most part, but there are some things, he’s beginning to realize, that can’t change. He stops telling Kat about those.

      He sees the Winchesters again. When he was young, he wanted to see them as often as he could, would wait for those visions in his room with his crayons sorted around him. But seeing a man torn from the inside out changes that. He knows what demons are long before he has a name for them. He knows about angels as well. He sees the man (the angel, he had realized with startled awe and trepidation) with horribly merciful eyes be leveled and rebuilt. The Winchesters are filled with hope and devastation. He wishes, now, that he couldn’t see them.

      He and Kat fight vampires and shapeshifters and more ghosts and hauntings than they can keep track of. They found a demon once, by accident. After, when the black smog had raced out of its host, Lucas has new scars across his arms and back and Kat’s head is more bruise than face. Kat records herself saying the exorcism on her phone and on his. Kat records everything on her phone. She talks into it on the rides back to town while she drives and allows Lucas to pretend to sleep.

 

\---

 

        He’s seventeen and realizes that the apocalypse has been happening for years.

        He’s seventeen and all his mother wants to talk about is college.

        Lucas and his mother both pour over flyers and websites, make lists of pros and cons, visit the nearby campuses. He makes a list of ones to apply to. He lets his mother collect pamphlets and essay topics while he makes plans that could never involve college. Kat grips the steering wheel too hard when he tells her. She tells him he should go, without looking at him and won’t listen when he tries to explain that he can’t. They don’t speak much that week and he’s short with her until she drops it. She begins to bite her lip when she looks at him in the rear view mirror and begins to drive them past the local colleges more.

       He doesn't point it out because he’s seventeen and he thinks he’s going to die. He thinks they’re all going to die. There was too little time left to fight with her. Instead, they hunt and they talk and Kat ruffles his hair after nights when they almost die. He might think that the world is going to end but Lucas doesn’t let them eat at certain restaurants anyway. He passes Leviathan in the street and does not flinch but wants to. 

      He grows used to the screaming of Winchester boys in the back of his brain. Its almost a relief when he can’t see Dean anymore.

 

\---

 

       He’s eighteen and he lives. He’s eighteen and he places a note on the kitchen table before he leaves with a bag filled with his life and his other life. He makes sure his room is clean.

      Kat’s outside in her old car that has dents across its back, and she’s looking at him like he’s made a mistake. She doesn’t make him turn around though, and drives off down the street and out of town. He thinks, that for Kat, watching him must be like watching a mirror. She never mentions home. He won’t talk about his anymore. Neither of them ask and strangers keep to themselves.

      This year, he watches angels fall from the sky in his mind before he watches them, like stars and explosions, crash onto earth from the roof of their old dented car. He sees Dean, after a year of only getting a rare glimpse of Sam, looking almost happy. Sometimes he wonders if he should find those Winchesters again, tell them about having black void eyes and losing. He doesn’t. He never tells Kat about the unchangeable either.

      They go everywhere now, wherever Lucas’ visions and Kat’s research takes them. Kat fires a burning arrow into an old god of sleep’s heart to save a town from insomnia induced violence. Lucas breaks a witch’s curse on a small girl who kills everyone she has touched. They survive by burning bones and hex bags but they survive. They’re alright.

 

\---

       Lucas turns nineteen.

      He sits in the back of Kat’s car and watches her drive. She speaks quietly into her phone about the demon they’d banished back to hell and the body it had left behind. He has a stack of sketches on his lap of the men who saved his life. The Winchesters, he knows, will never be alright. They’re broken, mostly, those brothers. They saved the world but not themselves. Lucas hasn’t saved much, but he’s saved some. Kat saved everyone she could. 

      Lucas has scars and marking all across his body. He’d feel naked without them; unrecognizable. He looks down at the portrait on top of the stack of papers, looks into blank black eyes. Hunters, Lucas knows, die too young. If they don’t, they die old and bitter. He’s known hunters who have lived to see grandchildren, but none who are happy.

      (There’s a paper tucked away beneath his seat, hidden in a corner. There’s red and blonde streaked across it. There’s another  crumpled at the bottom of his duffle bag of an old man with an iron ring drunk in an old tavern, slumped over and fading.)

      They’re alright, he and Kat, in the here and the now, sitting in her dented truck filled with holy water and knives. They save some people, hurt some people, make new scars, and listen to the radio on rainy days. He keeps the hidden pages from Kat, like he does with all of the things they can’t change.


End file.
